Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv

Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, 2015. Video still.

Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event

Fold 1 of Digital Ecologies 2018-2019: a project in two folds

at the Center of Contempoary Art ‘Ancient Bath’ (6th September Str. 179) and the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD (Ekzarh Yosif Str. 16) in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

With works and interventions by Donatella Bernardi, Ursula Biemann, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Voin de Voin & Simone Gilges, Jonas Etter, David Jacques, Monica Ursina Jäger, knowbotiq, Dominique Koch, Marlene Maier, Boyan Manchev, Angela Melitopoulos, Uriel Orlow, Ursula Palla, Elena Peytchinska, Elodie Pong, Isabel Reiß, Oliver Ressler, Dorothea Rust, Kerstin Schroedinger, Pascal Schwaighofer, Sandro Steudler, Axelle Stiefel, Kamen Stoyanov, Milva Stutz, Katharina Swoboda, Una Szeemann & Bohdan Stehlik, Lena Maria Thüring, and Alexander Tuchaček.

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova, co-curated by Katharina Swoboda and Emil Mirazchiev.

27 July to 5 September 2018

Opening: 27 July 2018 (detailed program of events on 28/29 July forthcoming)

Digital Ecologies is composed of two folds of a large international exhibition project and takes place across two venues, the Ancient Bath and the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The first, an exhibition project with talks, interventions and performances, takes place from 27 July to 5 September 2018 under the title, Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event; and the second, an expanded exhibition project building on the first exhibition and its context and participants with an accompanying symposium, from 4 May to 29 July 2019 (symposium on 5/6 May 2019).

Digital Ecologies brings on display art works that exhibit an engagement with ecological domains to constitute a constellation of eco-art and emancipatory art practices of committed aesthetic inventions. They have ethical implications in the age of meta-data and the political economy of valorization of information under post-internet conditions, and in the troubling times of rapid and unpredictable climate change associated with global warming. The exhibition project is a platform to display, but also a laboratory for joint research to invent new concepts, affects and percepts – a space of transmission of ideas on how to transform knowledge into practice, and practice into knowledge, with its own temporality.

Operaismo Naturale revolves around the urgent questions of what kind of aesthetic practices can urge ecological thought through the multitude of artist practices on display in a multivalent project. There is some wonder what concept of ecology to embrace, or rather the resonances among so many concepts, some of them contradictory, but welcome as ‘Ecologies of Nothingness’ and its voiding love in troubled times, ‘Ecology without nature’ or ‘Dark ecology.’ The project encourages the viewers to explore the potentiality of this “dark precursor” that opens up a new passage of ecological thinking. How do these eco-logical sensibilia of what are doubles of thought relate to the issue of brain creativity that can be grasped as leaving room for more creative tracings? What kind of ecology can happen in the dark room, and how does ecological awareness actually start with the little glimmering in the dark depths of vast nature? This is the ecology of a black box and its lighting system of immediate and infinite reversible movements of lightning flashes. A Furling Machine that creates new ways of seeing and hearing, new ways of feeling, a logological cabinet (by extension curious) that ‘exhibits’ a will to form and affect plasticity.

Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event takes inspiration from the desire by Deleuze & Guattari to write a philosophy of nature in which any distinction between nature and artifice becomes blurred. The ultimate volume of Philosophy of Nature remains an unwritten project in the body of their collective work, in the channels of their non-linear micro-logic of philosophical ideas. It leaves an unoccupied space for us to speculate, to fabulate, to experiment what and how such a philosophy could be that is inevitably a matter of aesthetics and ethics. The unwritten Philosophy of Nature is a project of naturalist materialism in science-fiction that remains an open work, a threshold for ‘heretic’ ideas in the blurred zone between nature and artifice, or what Michel Foucault called points of heresies, which correspond to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Event-centered singularities” and resonances between them that make up the diagrammatic feature of the plane. Their physical magnitude can unexpectedly take us off in a new direction, where there is no longer a need for speculative unity between nature and spirit or between nature and technology, but rather ecologic modulations of micro brains’ plasticity. The plastic forces operate between the organic and inorganic, between human and non-human. Their plastic method is not so much a transformation of one into the other but something passing of one into the other to anticipate the future of social and politico-aesthetic change.

A project of Art today association, Plovdiv in collaboration with Corner College, Zurich.

This project is part of the official program of Plovdiv 2019, European Capital of Culture.

It is supported by the Municipal Foundation Plovdiv 2019, Pro Helvetia, Goethe Institut Sofia, the Federal Chancellery of Austria (Bundeskanzleramt), the Austrian Embassy in Sofia, and organized by the Art Today Association.